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Basilisk Nebula
The Basilisk Nebula, off the northwestern edge of the Sea trade route, contains a group of mud-and-blood planets teeming with escaped slaves, slavers, skinners, whores, hunters, brindled men, and worse. Corsair towns and pirate lairs—which reuse names like Black Pudding, Port Plunder, Sty, and Whore's Gash—spring up and are quickly abandoned. Life in the systems is described as nasty, brutal, and often short. The primary planet is hot, humid, and swarming with stinging flies, sand fleas, and bloodworms, making them unhealthy for both man and beast. * The Isle of Toads, located east of Basilisk Point and home to the mysterious Toad Stone made of oily black stone. * Talon, a large, claw-shaped island north of the Isle of Tears, home to the corsairs' slave market and Barter Beach. Corsairs have fortified Talon's honeycombed caverns. Pirates gather to trade at Barter Beach and slaves are sold or ransomed at the island's markets. * Skull Isle, the northernmost of the Basilisks, where the corsairs deliver skulls to some dark god. windswept and uninhabited. Many of corsairs of the Basilisks decorate the hulls and masts of their ships with severed heads. When the flesh has rotted off them, the corsairs replace the heads with fresh ones, while the bare skulls are delivered to Skull Isle as an offering to some dark god. The shores of the island are lined with skulls. * The Isle of Tears is the largest. Steep-sided valleys and black bogs hide amongst the rugged flint hills and twisted, windswept rocks of this southern island. * Isle of Flies: The Brotherhood of Bones was a brotherhood of pirates and corsairs that settled a century after the Red Death killed most people there. Ruins on the Isle of Tears, the Isle of Toads, and Ax Isle indicate the presence of an ancient civilization, now lost, established during the Dawn Age. Jedi Maester Yandel speculates the inhabitants of the Isle of Toads with an unpleasant, fishlike aspect to their faces, and many with webbed hands and feet, may have a link to this vanished people. The Old Empire of Ghis founded Gorgai on the Isle of Tears. The Valyrian Empire captured it during the Third Ghiscari War and renamed it Gogossos. The dragonlords used it as a twisted penal colony for the worst criminals. The pirates of the Basilisk Nebula profited from the chaos of the Century of Blood, until seventy-seven years after the Doom of Valyria, when a great plague known as the Red Death swept out of the slave pens and killed nine out of every ten persons, with the rest fleeing. The isles remained totally uninhabited for a full century afterwards, when (during the reign of King Jaehaerys I Targaryen) the Qartheen pirate Xandarro Xhore established himself on the Isle of Toads and the Brotherhood of Bones established themselves on the isles to the west. Ever since, once every generation a major fleet has been sent from the Free Cities to clear out the pirates. Some have ended in failure, but even the successful campaigns seem ultimately futile because new pirates always refill the isles shortly thereafter. One infamous expedition was led by Saathos Saan. Though he was sent to eliminate the pirates, Saan and his fleet instead turned pirate themselves and has reigned as King of the Basilisk Isles going on three decades now.